May 2011

May 23, 2011

So this morning Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells decided to get all apoplectic, largely because it's just not a full day for Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells if he DOESN'T get all apoplectic about something. Seriously, I'm surprised the guy doesn't give himself a stroke. Or maybe he already HAS given himself a stroke, and Hollywood Elsewhere is its aftereffect. In any event, I don't normally bring my little differences with him here, but it so happened he chose to get apoplectic about something I'm in the middle of examining first hand myself. "It's only just hit me that Warner Home Video's Barry Lyndon Bluray...has been masked at 1.85 to 1...storm the barricades!" Um, yeah, sure, whatever you say. Lest you wonder just how this "hit" him—something to do with the voices in his head, maybe?—he reproduces a bit of the liner tech-spec copy, which, sure enough, specifies a 1.85 aspect ratio, whereas Barry Lyndon itself is a 1.66, or something like that. After a bit of obligatory spittle-flecking ("and I know I'm in the right on this one," blah, blah blah) Wells goes on to quote one Tyler Williamson, writing on the standard-def DVD release, and wishing for "a Blu-ray remaster with Barry Lyndon's 1.59 or 1.66 image (the difference in more or less negligible, so I don't really care) in the center of a 1.78 frame -- which is how Blurays handle films with aspect ratios less wide than 1.78. All the 1.66 and 1.37 films on Blu-ray are done this way: Chungking Express, The Third Man, etc." (The 1.78 frame, incidentally...or really not so incidentally, when you come down to it—being the native aspect ratio of your 16:9 displays.)

And, er, guess what, kids? I actually have the Barry Lyndon Blu-ray, and I've actually looked at the image from the disc rather than just what turns out to be the misprint on the liner specs, and that's pretty much exactly the way Warner handled the approximately 1.66:1 frame of Barry Lyndon! I even took some pictures off my plasma screen, which I'm presenting uncropped to give the full effect of the centering. I even took a picture from the Criterion 1.66 Blu-ray of Chungking Express for context/comparison. Hell, I even took a picture from a genuine 1.85 Blu-ray, Raging Bull, for comparison/contrast. Check it out!

UPDATE: And by the way, the screencaps from the BluBrew "sneak peek" that have so many of the fellas at the Criterion Forum in a tizzy are inaccurate as well. Jesus.

From the "sneak peek." I don't know who the hell cropped this, but he or she...cropped it.

On my display. Note bottom of tree. Come on, people.

So. Hold off on storming those barricades, people. While this proves one more unfortunate "right as usual, sir" (see the paddleball scene in Blazing Saddles) moment for Wells, the news is good for Blu-ray-ready cinephiles, who may buy Barry Lyndon with relative confidence in the integrity of its aspect ratio.

FURTHER UPDATE (5/24/11): Well, this has been enlightening. And embarrassing. Prompted by the observations of several commenters, most prominently the one who calls himself "The Fanciful Norwegian," I have been looking into just how a 1.66 image resolves itself into a 1.66 image on my own personal display, a Hitachi P50V701 50-inch plasma. The Norwegian, citing the display from Chungking Express among other things, suggested a calibration issue. Well, the good news is I'm not sure that my set needs recalibrating. The bad news is that I've often been using the incorrect setting to watch my Blu-rays.

The P50V701 has two settings for "16:9 Standard." One would assume that the first one, "16:9 Standard 1," would be the most accurate. But no. According to the owner's manual, "Use this aspect mode to display 16:9 sources...preserving the original aspect ratio showing 95% of the size." Say what? Yeah, 95%. Hence the problem on the Chungking Express frame cited below by the frivolous one, not to mention the paucity of black bars on the side of the screen. As it happens, quite counterintuitively in my opinion, it is the "16:9 Standard 2" setting that is "preserving the original 16:9 aspect ratio showing 100% of the size." Now sorry to put up blurry shots of a TV screen one more time, but here's the Chungking on said display in "16:9 Standard 2," now showing more lightbulbs and more indications of its 1.66 aspect ratio:

And here's Barry Lyndon, in, yes, 1.78:1, goddammit.

My apologies to you all and particularly to the BluBrew people (although, yeah, what Joel E. said, too; also, why crop your thumbnails so severely, I wonder?), but none to my frenemy Mr. Wells, who went off even more half cocked than I, what with going from box copy rather than the disc itself. As disagreeable as 1.78 is, it still isn't 1.85. And this story isn't over yet. As it happens I'm interviewing Leon Vitali, a keeper of the Kubrick flame, tomorrow, and this issue will be on the agenda. Stay tuned...

Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over hisshoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children; in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the armchair and put up his feet on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and reread every word, he opened it at a different place and found himself at the third chapter. He went on reading:

When Michael Solomon got the position of Editor-In-Chief of Premiere magazine in November of 2000, I was terrified. I had been working there since 1996, under Jim Meigs as head man, and while Jim and I had an often tumultuous relationship, on balance he really cut me a whole lot of slack in terms of my being an overdrinking, coming-in-to-the-office-at-11-a.m.-on-a-GOOD-DAY, quarrelsome querulous asshole. Whether my reputation had preceded me or not, I had a sense I was gonna have to straighten out a bit, or at least show a Willingness To Perform, for the new guy.

Didn't take me long to get my chance. As it happened, Michael, who despite my intimidation I took an immediate liking to when I saw that one of the first things he installed in his office was a sliver tray bearing two large tumblers and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black, had an idea that he wanted to make a BIG splash with his first issue. Investigative reporter John Connolly (with whom I had done some stuff at Premiere during the Meigs era; I won't go into it here, as I need to save SOME material for a memoir that I'll actually get frigging PAID for) had an idea: Schwarzenegger, who was a well-known woman-chasing-and-pawing dawg with—ew!— pig valves in his heart, and whose oft-speculated-upon political ambitions were showing signs of stirring again, and who Connolly had excellent materials and/or sources on. Just put me on a plane, Connolly pretty much said.Looking very serious, Solomon asked me, "Can we do this?" I practically jumped into his lap and started drooling. "Sure, I mean four weeks isn't that long if you want it for the January issue, but it shouldn't be a problem." The last big piece I had worked on with Connolly had taken eight months of reporting and vetting and long meetings with lawyers and publicists from pitch to actual publication. What can I tell you guys? I wanted to keep my job.

So out John went. We had worked out that as speed was of the essence, we would write-as-we-go. That is, Connolly would fax me notes or just tell me shit over the phone and I would craft prose based on them; not in my customary conversational piling-up-subordinate-clauses style, but in a terse, sometimes mildly ironic, slightly moralistic tone during the setups leading to just-the-facts-ma'am passages of scandal data. John was a real pit bull in terms of pursuing individual stories, and would go after any lead, so another part of my job was narrowing his focus. There were a number of different Arnold-behaving-badly themes he wanted to pursue, and just to keep the fucking thing moving, or because I didn't much care, I would discourage this, encourage that. I remember having a devil of a time having PAL videocassettes of Arnold copping a feel off of a British morning show hostess converted to NTSC, but once that happened, well, there he was. "Playful," I think his claque referred to this sort of thing as.

Of course Arnold's legal representatives, once word got out that Connolly was turning up at greater Los Angeles body-building hangouts got out, took umbrage, and their pushback approach was two-pronged; first, they tried to remind the Premiere editors what a Bad Person John Connolly was (there had been some stock market shenanigans in which his name had been mentioned, back in the Golden '80s), and then, rather peculiarly, coming right out and telling us just which bits of Arnold scandal they considered actionable, as in, "if you say [X], we'll sue." Almost a roadmap, one of our own lawyers noted, a bit bemusedly, as it turned out to be an incredible helpful document as we vetted the finished piece.

I remember being at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2001, having two-to-three hour conference calls with Connolly and Hachette's legal team and Premiere's fact-checkers (and let me mention that Hachette's legal people were always incredibly helpful and encouraging to us whenever we did sensitive stories, which you wouldn't necessarily think if you know certain aspects of the history of U.S. Premiere at Hachette) and thinking, "Holy crap, we're really pulling this off." We had a GREAT headline ("Arnold The Barbarian"), Matt Mahurin did a really creepy photo-illustration, and our stuff was fucking airtight. What it all meant in the larger scheme of things was completely beyond my ken at that moment, but at least I wasn't going to get fucking fired.

You know who did get fucking fired? Michael Solomon. Before he had even served out a year as Premiere's editor-in-chief. And believe it or not, the Arnold story represented the first couple of nails in his coffin. Yeah, we got A LOT of Hollywood blowback from Schwarzenegger's claque: irate letters from very big-name collaborators, many of them women, complaining at how disappointed they were that Premiere was trucking in such baseless garbage and what a great guy Arnold was. (And I do believe, incidentally, that the protestations of Schwarzenegger's great-guyness were entirely sincere; after all, don't we all have friends who are generous and kind to us and may be less than entirely gallant in other respects, about whom we tend to say, "Oh, that's just X?" when we hear stories of them doing things that aren't so cool?) Every day for like two weeks there were a bunch of new letters, and the names: James Cameron, Jamie Leigh Curtis, Emma Thompson (whose verbal wrist-slapping was hand-written; I remember thinking she had the most beautiful handwriting of any living person that I had ever seen) and so on. But there was no black-balling, no "We'll never work with Premiere again" grandstanding. From any of them. It was just due-diligent noise-making. Because, as much as they liked the fellow, they really did know what was up.

No, the blowback that counted actually echoed that which we got from our readers, many of whom were up in arms that we were "picking" on Arnold. It wasn't just a matter of people thinking highly of Schwarzenegger; because of his rags-to-riches story and Terminator awesomeness, people actually had quite a bit invested in the idea of thinking highly of Schwarzenegger, and they just didn't want that messed with. Quite a few of the bigwigs at Hachette, both French and American, apparently looked at "Arnold the Barbarian" and said "Why are they/is he doing this?" Hachette had acquired U.S. Premiere in order to unify it with the international editions of the book; aside from that, the company never really had much of an idea of what to do with it. THIS, however, they did NOT want to do. So the fellas upstairs all of a sudden got a little bit skeptical of the young man who had been their exciting new fair-haired boy just about ten weeks before. Michael was out in October, I think. And now when people cite the history of reputable Arnold scandal-mongering, all they talk about is the 2003 Los Angeles Times piece. Well, Premiere was there first, and we didn't get sued. Next time I see Michael Solomon, I think I'll buy him a drink.

May 18, 2011

Reading all the ohmigodhesaidhesympathizedwithHitler staggering-to-the-fainting couch over today's big Cannes Film Festival press conference "gaffe," I recall, not so fondly (I had to cancel a trip to Moscow on account of it—long story), my sole phone interview with the insouciant Lars von Trier, in the summer of 2000, about Dancer In The Dark, in which he insisted in all earnestness that working with Bjork was, for him the equivalent of fighting in Vietnam, and that no, he was not exaggerating nor was he speaking metaphorically. Von Trier's a genuine artist and likely more than just a bit of an odd duck and I think his "outrageousness" (that is, his acting like a dick) comes from a real place, but it's not necessarily the place that many of the bait-swallowers think it's coming from.

UPDATE: Did I say something about bait-swallowers? Oh my. I suppose there are more dignified ways of locking up a defense-of-free-speech Palme d'or, but hey, whatever works...

May 17, 2011

In late April, Warner Home Video scored a coup of sorts and put out a DVD box called Tracy & Hepburn: The Definitive Collection, which puts together all nine of the films co-starring legends Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in one handy-dandy package. A great number of the films they made together are not under the Warner rubric, so, like the recent Kazan box set from Fox, this is a bit of a diplomatic achievement. The thing about the Tracy-Hepburn collaborations is that, until I'd say as late as Adam's Rib, they don't look as if they were really approached as such, that is, as collaborative works by two distinctive artists; they were just films that had the two stars, who were romantically involved off-screen, working together. They didn't signify as "Tracy and Hepburn" pictures in other words.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Or I should say ourselves. When I got the box set, I proposed to My Lovely Wife Claire that it might be a fun thing for us to assess together, since she and I are so VERY much like Tracy and Hepburn themselves. But seriously. Claire did some DVD reviewing for me back in the Premiere days, and I've always been a fan of her writing, and her overall perceptiveness and sunniness and all sorts of "ness" informs my work at its best, I like to think. So, this informal project, wherein we watch the Tracy/Hepburn pictures and concoct, each week, a "dialogue" about the picture.

The first picture is the first that Hepburn and Tracy made together, of course, the 1942 Woman of the Year, directed by George Stevens, in which sports columnist Tracy falls for "emancipated" highfalutin political columnist and knows-all-the-right-people gadabout Hepburn, and shows her the proper place for a...well, I don't need to say it. The movie happens to rank pretty high on our friend The Self-Styled Siren's "Ten Movies The Siren Should Love...But Does Not" list, and when we popped it in Claire, who had not seen the picture before, was curious as to why. It didn't take her long to find out, as our dialogue below attests...

Claire Kenny: This was not at all what I expected, and I’m afraid I just didn’t much enjoy it…I think you felt the same? I feel like I’m SUPPOSED to enjoy it; I know that it’s a “classic,” and obviously KH/ST have all the fabulous zesty crackly brainy interactions we expect, but there was just too much stuff I would have to overlook. This is for the obvious thematic (anti-feminist) reasons, but they manifested themselves in ways I wasn’t anticipating. I thought, if anything, it was going to be one of those things where the big fancy career girl is Just Too Uppity For Her Own Good, and he’s going to have to “tame” her, which would of course have been frustrating and off-putting. But this was really worse in a way, because it’s not just that Hepburn’s Tess is smart and ambitious and successful, it’s that she’s not LIKABLE. She’s selfish and inconsiderate and flighty, exhibited most appallingly in her surprise adoption of an orphan and subsequent disinterest in even the most fundamental aspects of his wellbeing. Meanwhile Tracy’s Sam cranks around this big beautiful apartment, pouting over being neglected and getting no time alone with his new wife, and maybe you shouldn't have gotten married after knowing someone for thirty seconds, Spence?? I’m not sure what we’re supposed to get from this—is she insufferable because she doesn’t embrace her wifely station, or are we supposed to think of her as insufferable by nature, and in turn think of this quality as essential to feminine success? I realize I should make allowances for its datedness, but it may have aged past the point of being bearable. The ending is…meh. The slapstick element of Tess’s attempts to make breakfast for Sam don’t really work—something is off with the pacing, it’s just not madcap enough—and her implied assumption of a more subservient role irks. On the other hand, I wasn’t clear what she was going to do exactly—it seemed the plan was basically “work less, hyphenate last name, leave my slick apartment behind for this townhouse complex.” Which is fine, I guess. No suggestion that Sam was going work less, but this is probably too much to expect for 1942.

I do give the movie bonus points for Tess’s father’s scrumptious country house in Connecticut. I’m a sucker for classic-movie country houses.

Glenn Kenny: You got more takeaway from the ostensible content than I did...or is it that I'm just an insensitive male? Everything you're saying about the offensiveness of the chauvinism is entirely correct, but none of that registered for me as strongly as just what a logy, dry, and leaden picture this is from stem to (almost) stern. George Stevens at his best is, as we all know from reading our copies of The American Cinema, an auteur, but damn, when I see a Stevens film that doesn't click for me I tend to ask myself, where the hell is George Stevens at his best, because this sure as hell is pretty far from it. [N.B., that's merely a quasi-rhetorical question designed to conjure my particular feeling of frustration with this movie; but for actual answers concerning Stevens' greatness, you could do worse than to check out Raymond De Felitta's pieces about him at Movies 'Til Dawn—part one is here—and/or The Siren's recent breakdown of a classic scene from Giant.]The Hepburn/Tracy "chemistry" is there but just barely...it seeps through the cracks of the cretinous plotting (man, that business with the orphaned kid is beyond crassly lame) and only really comes to life —and here's the main thing I disagree with you about concerning the film—in the finale, which, content aside, is a funny slapstick bit that harks back to Stevens' days as a director of Laurel and Hardy shorts, and underscores the teams' core talents in the comic arena. It is, admitedly, almost completely out of place here, but welcome nonetheless. If I may be so bold I'd like to speculate that had Hepburn and Tracy not wound up together romantically, they might have never been cast together again on the "strength" of this film. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Claire Kenny: It's not that I got more out of this than you did--I think I was having the same problems as you, and the most interesting emotional response I could find was righteous indignation. Which is really not saying much--"the only thing your movie offered me, Mr. Stevens, was enough offensive content to keep me moderately annoyed for two hours." I keep thinking about your last statement, though, and I can't decide whether or not I agree. It's of course a false exercise, because we have all the benefits of hindsight and a body of terrific joint work to look back on, but I can see why a viewer in 1942 would look at this and see the potential for lots of wonderful future pairings. Neither actor is at all like any other film actor I can think of, of any period, and the combination of their specific talents and intelligences and weird rough edges is something that doesn't make conceptual sense until you see it onscreen. Even from this weak start, I see what made people want more. And I'm still not with you on the finale. Here's why: I think that for slapstick (which I'll admit is not my favorite thing) to be really effective, the environmental obstacles almost have to take on the qualities of another character who's in active battle with the performer(s). And for THAT to work, the performer has to appear to *believe* that the obstacles have wills of their own, and might win the battle--whereas Katharine Hepburn is not believable as someone who can't master her environment. She's only effectively undone on film by some kind of emotional circumstance; she doesn't read as someone incapable in practical ways. So here, she looks like someone very good at waffle-making pretending like she doesn't know how to make waffles. Stevens compensates for this with lingering shots of the wafflemaker bubbling over, or whatever, which kills the pace.

Glenn Kenny: Touché. I can’t say you’re wrong in your analysis of that penultimate scene, Maybe I was so longing for a Laurel and Hardy short by that point in the dreary Woman that I overcompensated imaginatively. In any event, the picture itself is sufficiently dispiriting as a viewing experience (as opposed to a subject for historical study, that is) that I’m almost overeager to get to the next…

The next will be Keeper of the Flame, directed by George Cukor. Stay tuned!

May 16, 2011

One of my Axioms of Cinema is "Never count an auteur out." It has been in that spirit that I've dutifully sat through everything that Woody Allen has produced in recent years, and to tell you the truth, I had been starting to doubt the wisdom of my own words. Until now. I think the new one, Midnight in Paris, is absolutely wonderful, and I go a bit into why in my review for MSN Movies. By the same token, I have no trouble allowing that my friend Kent Jones' essay on the picture in the latest Film Comment pretty much mops up the floor with my piece, and everything else I've read on the movie thus far, so you ought to check that out as well. Or first, even.

As for viewing, well, I had ambitions to finally introduce MLW to Clouzot's Diabolique, but we wound up watching a goofy Law and Order SVU and Saturday Night Live instead; the latter was pretty delightful, with the real Lindsay Buckingham standing next to Mr. Hader's impersonation of him being an especial highlight. I should also note that as trying as I often find Union Market, I am charmed by its habit of playing vintage Blue Note stuff on its sound system, and hearing Herbie's "Survival of the Fittest" while scouring the produce section inspired me to put on Maiden Voyage for the first time in a long time when I got home.

May 10, 2011

For at least one person with whom I’ve discussed the book, the designated Chapter 9 of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, headed “Author’s Foreword,” is a real uh-oh moment for the unfinished novel, particularly coming as it does after the very raw and straightforward and harrowingly detailed Chapter 8, describing the particulars of the worse-than-hardscrabble early years of Toni Ware, of whom it is said in Chapter 45, “do not mess with this girl; this girl is damaged goods.” For Wallace to offer up such a magnificent and evocative and straightforward piece of prose, I have heard it argued, and then introduce himself as a character in the novel, thus falling back on one of the tired postmodernist tropes/tricks that he himself had often avowed to be well and truly fed up with, well, that is/should be kind of disappointing, what?

Well, without getting too much into the vexed issue of postmodernism and literature, to complain about postmodernist tricks is indicative that postmodernism has done a pretty shitty job of making itself understood. If we look at the postmodern investigation as at least in part and attempt to pull back the curtain of artistic artifice in order to get at certain deeper truths about the stories we tell, then to express impatience with that investigation could be seen as an admission that we’d rather be lied to. But again, if we go there, we’re not going to get to the precise point I want to go to here. So let’s look at the ostensible laying-of-the-cards-on-the-table in Chapter 9:

Right here is me as a real person, David Wallace, age forty, SS no. 975-04-2012, addressing you from my form 8829-deductible home office at 725 Indian Hill Blvd., Claremont 91711 CA, on this fifth day of spring, 2005,to inform you of the following:

All of this is true. This book is really true.

The careful reader familiar with certain specifics of the “real” author’s biography might notice something right off the bat, which is that on the fifth day of spring, 2005, David Foster Wallace would have been age 43, not age 40; his birth date was in February of 1962. Readers who were fortunate enough to have known Wallace personally will also recall that when announcing himself on the phone or in a voice mail or what not, he did not very frequently at all refer to himself as “David Wallace” but rather as “Dave Wallace,” so there’s another clue for you all that in ostensibly pulling back the curtain on fiction’s artifice Wallace is in fact constructing another fiction atop the premise that he’s pulling back the curtain, which becomes clearer still once it’s understood that the whole business about getting your original Social Security number with a special number beginning with “9” once you enter the IRS as an employee is a complete (and pretty funny) fiction. So who’s the real author of The Pale King, and what’s he really doing? A little later on in that chapter he refers to having had the “specific dream” of becoming a “great fiction writer a la Gaddis or Anderson, Perce or Balzac.” Note not just the names, but the “or” rather than “and.” All this counts.